The inventive concept relates to communication network and, more particularly, to a flow-based packet forwarding device and a packet managing method thereof.
In recent years, network business environment may change suddenly due to explosive increase in wireless data, caused by population of smart phones, and appearance of new types of application services such as social networks, clouds, smart televisions, and the like. Also, the network may be requested to receive new and various requirements more flexibly. Development on new network paradigm such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) may be proceeding actively.
The SDN may be new network technique capable of dynamically configuring and controlling a network dynamically according to various requirements of the user and service without limitation of a conventional closed network service environment. With the SDN, a control plane of a conventional network device separated from a forwarding plane may be collected at a centralized controller to control a software-based network overall. A typical example of the SDN may be the OpenFlow network.
In network system where control plane is separated from forwarding plane, packets arriving at forwarding device may be classified into flows according to header information, and may be processed according to matched flow entry searched at locally managed flow table.
If flow rule matching is failed, however, request for flow entry may be iteratively forwarded to the controller. In this case, load of the controller may increase, and bottleneck phenomenon of the controller may be caused. That is, the network performance may be lowered generally.